Rosamond Jacob

Dr Leeann Lane is Head of Irish Studies at Mater Dei Institute of Education (a college of Dublin City University). She has published on the co-operative work of George Russell and on the children's novelist Patricia Lynch.

• ONE: Introduction; TWO: Suffrage and Nationalism, 1904-14; THREE: Revolutionary years: Waterford 1915-19; FOUR: Revolutionary years: a Dublin focus 1916-21; FIVE: Single women, sex and the new State; SIX: Politics1922-36; SEVEN: Conclusion(s): Decline and nostalgia 1937-60; Bibliography; Index.

'This is a wonderfully polychromatic canvas painted in pointillist technique, as absorbing a read as a meticulous Seurat. The detail brings the subject to life.' The Friendly Word Winter 2011 'Jacob was atypical in practically every sphere in which she was active - her milieu and her political journey are interesting, and if Jacob was not successful she was certainly not ordinary, as this ambitious biography well shows.' Irish Times Saturday Jan. 2011 'an informative, engaging and enlightening read.' Irish Literary Supplement, Spring 2012 'The interweaving of public and private concerns is well handled by Lane, and her analysis does, as she suggests, offer 'an important alternative angle on what it meant to be a woman, a republican supporter and a human being in Ireland in the period'. While her 'ordinariness' is open to question, this study of Jacob's life is a timely reminder of the need to 'think outside the box' when considering those who peopled the past.' Irish Studies Review 19 (4) 2011 'Leeann Lane's sensitive reading of the diaries forms the backbone of this biographical study, but she largely avoids simply plundering them for information about other, better known individuals. Jacob herself remains admirably at the centre of this book, Lane's insightful reading of her novels adding to the sense of a life unfolding with the turn of each page. - One of the strengths of this biography, in fact, is the way in which Lane chronicles the life of a woman who recorded what it felt like to live in her particular circumstances at different times of her long life, how she moved in and out of ordinariness and how ordinariness itself changed in meaning over the course of the twentieth century. - The biography is richly textured and informative and should be the essential starting-point for anyone interested in the extraordinary life of Rosamond Jacob.' English Historical Review cxxvii: 525 (April 2012) 'Rosamond Jacob, the Irish Republican activist, feminist, and novelist, is the subject of this meticulously researched and thoughtful new biography by Leeann Lane. Jacob was ignored and undervalued during her lifetime, living a solitary life along the fringes of the great political and social movements that shaped the newly postcolonial Irish state in the first half of the twentieth century. Never a leader within these movements but always an active worker on their behalf, Jacob's life is a fascinating portrait of what Lane calls 'a life more ordinary.' - Lane's work in shaping the complex narrative of Jacob's life is feminist historiography at its finest; she interweaves the intimate details of Jacob's struggles to find her place in a patriarchal culture with a thorough assessment of the political realities of life in the years of war and nation building that result in a postcolonial Irish state. The necessary conflation of the personal and the political in Lane's portrait of Jacob offers readers new insight into the frustrating diminishment of women's political participation in Irish governance during the first decades after independence. - It is thanks to the rich archive offered by her private diaries, housed in the National Library, that Lane is able to gain such intimate access into this remarkable woman's insights into her own life and culture. Rosamond Jacob: Third Person Singular is necessary reading for anyone interested in the history of Irish feminism and female political activism during the first half of the twentieth century' Journal of British Studies Here is a copy of Catriona Crowe's speech from the launch on 13 December 2010: I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress, start a scene or two, Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool, Deferential, glad to be of use, Politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous- Almost, at times, the Fool. The Love-song of J Alfred Prufrock, TS Eliot's first great poem, contains these lines, where the narrator proclaims his place in the world as ancillary, mildly useful, slightly pompous, slightly stupid, virtuous, timid; in all, an ordinary life with no pretensions to greatness, but saved in some measure by the narrator's self-conscious and accurate version of himself. Leeann Lane's superb biography of Rosamond Jacob presents us with a female life more ordinary than those we have encountered to date for the crucial years leading up to and away from the foundation of the Irish state. As of now, it is fairly inconceivable that a male life of this kind would be considered worthy of extensive biographical study. I suggest that this is an area where women's history is ahead of the game. Rosamond Jacob was born into a Quaker family in Waterford in 1888, moved to Dublin in 1919, and died there, killed while crossing the road, in 1960. She didn't marry, had no children, was not gay. She had an unsatisfactory affair in her forties which meant a great deal to her. She never owned a house, living in rented accommodation all her life. She was involved in various ways in the cultural revival and the nationalist and feminist movements from early adulthood on, never in prominent positions.Her friends included Mrs.Pearse and Hannah Sheehy Skeffington, two of the most iconic women of the revolutionary period; she shared lodgings with Dorothy Macardle and Lucy Kingston, two interesting activists in the spheres of feminism and nationalism. She wrote three novels, two of which were published, a children's book, a history of the United Irishmen, and a fictional biography of Matilda Tone, wife of Theobald. So much for the bald facts. However, what makes Jacob extraordinary is the fact that she kept an almost daily diary from 1897, when she was 9 years old, to 1960, when she died. It comprises 170 'ordinary' volumes, and a final secret volume in which she is more frank about life events such as her affair with Frank Ryan. She also, usefully, sums up each year at the end of its entries. The diary has been used by a great many historians to illuminate various aspects of feminism and nationalism in the nascent independent Ireland, and as a crucial source for biographers of those she knew, like Sheehy Skeffington, Ryan and Macardle. Now, for the first time, this extraordinary document is used to illuminate the personality who created it, tracking her life from late Victorian Waterford to the era of Sean Lemass. Leeann quotes Robert Fothergill on how diaries turn the substance of history inside out: 'In the foreground is the individual consciousness, absolutely resisting the insistence of future historians that that it should experience itself as peripheral.' In the case of Jacob as described and analysed in this biography, the personal voice of the diarist matters as much as the major events she is describing, and her interior life becomes the main event. And what a voice it is. Rosamond Jacob is a mixture of scorn and uncertainty, radical opinions and unsatisfied longings, excluded outsider and acute observer, pacifist and supporter of violent revolution, her own worst enemy and a good friend to others. She comes at us from all kinds of angles, some of them very uncomfortable. Because we are privileged to know her innermost thoughts, we understand how isolated and lonely she sometimes felt, as well as sharing in her moments of triumph or satisfaction. We can observe her trajectory from a sheltered Quaker childhood to the loss of her faith, her deeply instinctive feminism, and her admiration for and commitment to the nationalist cause, as well as her misgivings about some of its methods. Leeann uses her fiction as well as her diary to demonstrate her intellectual, political and emotional development, giving us a wonderfully rounded picture of a woman who lived through and participated in momentous events, but who never felt herself to be at the centre of any of them. Like all good biographies, this one contextualises its subject, giving us the background to Quaker Waterford, Irish Parliamentary Party Waterford, and the development of the Gaelic League, Sinn Fein and suffrage groups in the city. Jacob was involved in the last three, but never assumed a leadership role, preferring to restrict herself to fairly menial tasks like leafleting and organising meetings. Her keen eye, however, took in everything; she remarks on the violent tendencies of the Irish Party supporters in Waterford, the stronghold of John Redmond, and the petty squabbles which regularly erupted in the various groups to which she belonged. Her family circumstances were comfortable but constraining; well into her twenties, she obeyed her mother's rules with regard to where she went. Also, she did not get on well with her sister-in-law, Dorothea, married to her brother Tom, to whom she was close. Her family regarded her with a mixture of alarm and exasperation, fearing that her outspoken radical opinions would prevent her getting married. She was Anglophobic from an early age, remarking on the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, which occurred on the same night as the demise of the household cat, Pansy, that 'we would all much rather go into mourning for her than for that hideous old woman.' (She was a cat lover, and in one of her novels she names the two featured cats Silken Thomas and Mick, after Michael Collins.) In 1909, she commented on a Quaker meeting in Waterford which included a lecture on notable English Quakers: 'Edith Bell said how noble they were and what a pity there were no Irish Friends fit to be classed with these English worthies, whereupon I was constrained to mention that these English worthies were mostly American, and one of them French; and on that everyone - even the Newtown boys - tittered as if I had said something absurd. I wish I could go somewhere where I wasn't known and believed beforehand to be mad, so that my remarks might for a time at least be taken on their own merits and not discounted at once as the necessarily absurd talk of a lunatic.' Here we see her dissatisfaction with the way both her views and her personality are perceived in public gatherings, and her outspokenness counterbalanced with extreme self-consciousness. She had an instinctive feminism quite at odds with prevailing views in Waterford, and was not shy of expressing it, despite the kind of reception she got, not least from her family. In many ways she was way ahead of her time in her dismay at the lack of female involvement in the Gaelic League and her objections to lack of female representation at the upper echelons of Sinn Fein. She also disliked Catholicism, something which created problems for her later as the new independent state solidified into a largely Catholic polity. In 1921, the diary records her distaste at 'the religious orgies that go on outside Mountjoy during executions'. Much of her distaste was aesthetic; she found the bathetic aspects of martyrdom, mourning and commemoration too much for her. But in fairness, she had renounced her Quaker faith early on, and thus placed herself in the small category of people without a religious faith in a highly-charged atmosphere of religiosity among the revolutionary organisations. When two of her nephews made mixed marriages in the 1940s, she was not pleased. She regarded the Ne Temere decree with horror, and considered the Catholic church to be anti-progressive and anti-woman. Her perception of the 1916 Rising was initially at second-hand, but she visited Dublin shortly after it ended and vividly describes the smoking ruins of O'Connell St. Her move to Dublin allowed her to involve herself more closely in the 1918 election and in Cumann na mBan, again in lesser roles, but she enjoyed the camaraderie of working with others for a cause, and while sceptical of what she saw as the predominant enjoyment of violent conflict, was not immune from such excitement herself. She describes hearing from Maighread Trench about Cumann na mBan members praying outside Mountjoy on the morning of Kevin Barry's execution, and 'by her way of telling it and by her expression, it was clear to me that she at least had got some enjoyment out of it. Min Ryan came in and told me all about McSwiney's funeral in Cork, and it was plainer still that she had enjoyed that. Hanna and I agreed that such things are a kind of emotional orgy. I know I am capable of such enjoyment myself and it is revolting to think of.' Such candour on these subjects is highly unusual, then and now. Her commitment to feminism never wavered, and she remained involved in key feminist organisations all her life. The diary records her constant sense of affront at inequality, and she judged politicians on their commitment to female emancipation. She describes a meeting with Arthur Griffith in 1922, when a deputation from various women's organisations attempted to get him to extend the franchise to women over 21 before the Treaty election: 'Griffith started by saying the Dail had no power to alter the franchise, and it would take 8 months to make a new register, and after a good deal of discussion ended by defying us to do our worst, and saying we, or nearly all of us, were really not out for votes but out to wreck the Treaty. He looked worried and was quite cross. He started every sentence with 'To be perfectly frank - which always heralds something nasty.' Jacob was on to spinspeak long before 'going forward' or 'we are where we are'. In the case of De Valera, she had something of a crush on him in the twenties, describing him as 'delicious' in 1926, probably the only time that adjective was applied to him, and believing that he might support female emancipation in power, but by 1937 he had become 'a man who badly needs to be taught a lesson, if only there were enough women with the guts to do it.' She admired people like Peadar O'Donnell and George Gilmore because of their proclaimed commitment to women's rights, but found the maternalistic and child-centred concerns of the Irish Housewives' Association and the Irish Women's Citizens and Local Government Association difficult to relate to as a childless single woman, although she fully endorsed their more general feminist demands. Her affair with Frank Ryan, poster boy of left-wing republicanism in the late twenties and early thirties, was an extremely important event in her life. She was ahead of her time in her sexual frankness, her complete lack of guilt at a non-marital sexual relationship, and her unconcealed admiration for good-looking men, whom she frequently describes in the diary. Ryan turned out to be a bit of a sleeveen, willing enough to show up at her flat at midnight for sex, but sloping off afterwards full of Catholic guilt. He also regularly ignored her at social gatherings, a humiliating experience which she was prepared to endure for the pleasure of his intermittent visits. Her descriptions of his morose silences in the mornings make you want to slap him. Incidentally, we learn that he didn't like sardines or cheese, but loved cake. The time she spent with him may have prevented her from forming a more secure permanent relationship; we'll never know. Like everyone, she wanted to be loved, and she drew a short straw due to her attraction to Ryan, and his inability to commit to her in any meaningful way. At least he didn't marry anyone else. During the affair, she sought help through psychoanalysis, albeit by correspondence with a therapist in London, who unfortunately died just as things were starting to work. She realised that the loss of her father when she was 19 had affected her gravely, as he was a bulwark of support to her, and she had, perhaps, been frozen in a kind of adolescence since that event. Again, we have a woman ahead of her time, reading Freud, trying to find out why she is attracted to a man who can do her no permanent good, and willing to accept fairly serious judgments on her personality and development. The book takes us through the ferment of cultural, revolutionary and feminist activity occurring in Ireland in the two decades leading up to independence, and then through the tangled webs of intertwined left-wing and women's organisations in the twenties and thirties, when the state was solidifying under the two main civil war parties, and there was not much room for anyone else. Jacob expanded her political and feminist interests during this period, joining the Friends of Soviet Russia, and representing the Irish branch on a trip to the Soviet Union in 1931, where she was impressed by the Soviet commitment to equal rights for women. She became involved in the International Alliance of Women, which gave her a chance to be active in the international peace movement and express her natural pacifism. She was not a successful novelist; Callaghan, her first novel, published in 1920, received quite favourable reviews, but was a commercial failure. The Troubled House, her second, while finished in the 1920s, was not published until 1938. Third Person Singular, the novel which provides the subtitle of this biography, has not been published. It is to be hoped that it will be in the near future. I have not read the novels, but Leeann quotes effectively and liberally from them, and some of the writing, and the way in which Jacob uses her characters to express complex emotional and political feelings, is really striking. Here is Maggie Cullen, wife and mother of three sons, in The Troubled House, which is set in the period 1916-21: "It came to my mind what a queer thing it was that my life should spend itself thus, almost entirely in love and care and fear and thought and anxiety over three men and a boy. Was I nothing but a being relative to them, without real existence of my own? Each one of them led his own life, had his centre in his own soul, as a human creature should, but I had no purpose or driving force in myself, nothing that was independent of them. It seemed absurd, futile, unworthy." The Feminine Mystique couldn't have put it better. Her final years were dogged by increasing ill-health - rheumatism, anaemia, shingles, neuralgia, sciatica - the whole dreary catalogue of what lies in store for us all. She seems to have borne these ailments uncomplainingly. She became involved in the anti-nuclear movement, attending meetings to protest against the hydrogen bomb, and joining a new anti-nuclear organisation established the year before she died. (Two women on Charleville Rd. to whom she distributed anti-nuclear leaflets told her "they wouldn't live long and didn't care what happened to the world".) She remained involved in the Irish Housewives' Association, which was enduring accusations of communism in the 1950s, and the Women's Social and Political League, in decline at this stage. A passionate advocate of animal welfare, she was secretary of the Anti-Vivisection League in the '50s. She spent a lot of her time visiting the old and the sick, and in particular in looking after the welfare of widows and mothers of republicans who had fallen on hard times, like Liam Mellows' mother, who drank a lot, and was, in Jacob's inimitable phrase 'as incontinent as blazes.' Rosamond Jacob adopted a number of causes early in her life, at a time when there were plenty of causes available. She remained a feminist, a nationalist, an Irish language revivalist, an animal rights activist, a civil and humanitarian rights proponent, and an opponent of censorship, sectarianism and militarism all her life. She was in many ways a model citizen, taking her responsibilities to participate in and change her society very seriously. She tried very hard to understand herself and to figure out what her unconscious motivations and deepest feelings were. She engaged in an honest (on her side) sexual relationship in early middle age which could have caused her social ruin. The sadnesses in her life, the lack of a close partner or friend being the main one, she bore stoically, knowing she was not the only woman in this situation in twentieth century Ireland. Her great gift to us, the diary in which she confided regularly over a period of 63 years, has now been used to its fullest capacity by Leeann Lane to give us an interior study, beautifully contextualised, of an interesting and brave woman who was well aware of her imperfections, but who never wavered in her conviction that the world could change, that women could be equal to men, and that she could vividly describe these changes and the messy processes involved in their achievement. She would love the idea that we are celebrating her life tonight in Newman House, finally centre-stage.' Catriona Crowe December 2010